With the black flag of al Qaeda flying over the American embassy in Tunisia, the murder of the American ambassador in Libya, the storming of the US embassy in Cairo, the burning of the American flag in London, and the torching of American businesses in Lebanon, the Obama administration is focused like a laser on its top priority: slashing defense.
Today, even as the Islamist Uprising spreads across the Muslim world, ranging from Kashmir to Malaysia, from the North Sinai peninsula to the streets of Sudan, the Obama administration released its sequester report, which discussed just how the automatic cuts required under the Budget Control Act of 2011 would play out. In short, the Obama White House would slash defense with a machete. Obama’s Office of Management and Budget admitted as much:
“No amount of planning can mitigate the effect of these cuts. Sequestration is a blunt and indiscriminate instrument. It is not the responsible way for our nation to achieve deficit reduction. The report leaves no question that the sequestration would be deeply destructive to national security, domestic investments and core government functions.”
Under the sequestration, most defense programs would be cut by 9.4 percent. Others would be cut as much as 10 percent. Medicare, by contrast, would be trimmed by a mere 2 percent.
This is the fault of a president so extreme that his last two budgets did not receive a single vote in the House or Senate. This is the fault of a president so extreme that when Republican House Speaker John Boehner offered him $800 billion tax increases over ten years in exchange for between $3 trillion and $3.5 trillion in spending cuts (or cuts to future growth) and a revision of the tax code, Obama tentatively agreed – then rejected it at the last minute, insisting on another $400 billion in tax increases. That impasse led to the creation of the Budget Control Act, which would have cut $1.5 trillion over ten years via a bipartisan deficit committee – but if the committee could not come to any deal, $1.2 trillion in cuts would immediately take effect.
President Obama insisted that about half of those cuts come from defense. That’s no surprise from a president who wants to unilaterally shrink America’s nuclear arsenal and take a chainsaw to the Pentagon budget. “The tide of war is receding but the question that this strategy answers is what kind of military will we need long after the wars of the last decade are over,” Obama said in January.
He hasn’t changed his tune. Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress continue insist on massive tax increases rather than coming to a budget reduction deal that would prevent such defense cuts; they’d rather watch our embassy security get sliced by $129 million in the midst of a global Islamist firestorm than cut the non-defense budget without dramatically raising taxes.
Meanwhile, of course, Obama is happy to spend unlimited quantities of cash on his favored domestic government programs. And he’s happy to have Fed Chair Ben Bernanke pump up the monetary supply in order to make that easier – even if it dumps America’s credit rating from AA+ to AA to AA-, thanks to Quantitative Easing 3 (or more accurately, Quantitative Easing Permanent).
This is the Obama Doctrine: a more dangerous world, and a weaker military.
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